Week 7 Podcast

The speaker recounts a scary experience during a cabin trip with friends. They heard a beeping sound from the basement, but were not allowed access. After contacting the Airbnb host and waiting, they discovered two locks on the gate, which the owner claimed were due to too many people on the property. The owner demanded $1,000 in cash to avoid charging them more on Airbnb. Feeling trapped, they paid and left, but now suspect foul play. They are in contact with Airbnb to report the incident. Hey, hey, hey guys. Welcome back to another podcast. My name is Rohan Thomas. Today is May 20th and yeah, start to a new week for having, the weather's been a lot better recently actually, but this past weekend we had a little fun cabin trip with me and a bunch of my boys. We went to like this B&B in near Kinkakee, Illinois and we had actually a crazy experience there. I just wanted to talk about that today. We were there from Friday till Sunday, so basically the whole weekend, but on Saturday night we randomly hear like a beeping sound and it's coming from the basement of the property. But the thing is we don't have access to the basement. There's a bunch of signs and the Airbnb owner told us many times do not go downstairs. We are not allowed downstairs. It is under surveillance. So we were like, what do we do? Because the alarm kept going off and we can't go check it out or see what it is. So we tried to contact the Airbnb host and tell her to make sure that she knows everything's okay. She didn't end up responding for an hour, hour and a half and this alarm has been going off the whole time. So we're just like trying to figure out what to do. Are we safe in the house? Should we leave? Should we stay? And now it's like 2 a.m. Saturday night or Sunday morning technically, but then we finally get a call back that she's coming. So we wait for her. We're waiting at the gate and we're just to have people already outside in their cars packed to go just in case if anything happens and then we try to get those cars out of there because they're just going to head back home. It's already late night. They can't get sleep or anything, but then we get to the gate where we've gone in and out all weekend and now if you look at the gate and there's two locks on the gate and we're very confused. So how do these locks get here? So then the owner somehow shows up out of nowhere and we start talking to her and we ask her about the lock and she seems to not know about it or how to open it, but she says she can probably figure it out. So then we're confused. How did this lock get there and where did it come from and why is it there? So then we start talking to the owner and the owner says, oh, we had too many people on the property that there's going to be a fee that we have to pay and we're like, oh, we didn't mean to. I mean, we had a couple people who came but didn't stay the whole time. So she saw that and counted everyone and said that they count and that we have to pay an extra fee for them. So we're like, okay, whatever. But we were still like very skeptical about the gate being locked and where she even showed up from. And then she says we have to pay $1,000 cash and this is where we were very suspicious and like, what do we do? Like that doesn't sound like legal or anything like that. But she says if we pay her $1,000 cash, she won't charge us which she claimed would be $2,500 on Airbnb. So now we're locked up, not locked up but we feel locked up there because the gate is closed and we are not allowed to leave. And now she's saying that we have to pay her $1,000 in cash. So what we end up doing is not being, we weren't able to contact Airbnb but in this situation we didn't know for our safety or what. So we ended up getting the $1,000 cash and paying her and we were able to leave after that. Well, I feel like right when we agreed to pay her the money, the gate was able to open that she found the key and some of her friends were able to leave. But since the Airbnb was in our name, we had to stay back and figure out the whole situation out before we could head back to Chicago. So after that, now we're just very suspicious. For our own safety, we just wanted to get out of there. So we left right away and then got back. And then now we are in contact with Airbnb trying to explain the situation and everything that happened because we figured that that is not right. And the way she did it and the way she even locked us in, we don't have any proof but that lock was not there the whole weekend when we went in and out and somehow just showed up out of nowhere. So we are very suspicious about that. And just now we're going to keep contact with Airbnb and see what ends up happening. But yeah, it was a very scary situation where we thought we were being held captive and pretty much she forced us to pay her $1,000 in cash. So there's no receipts or anything proof of it being sent to her. So yeah, that is basically our story for this week. And yeah, hope you all have a good week. I'm going to catch y'all next week. Peace.